Anghel, 24, was attending medical school in Romania

AJAX, Ont. — A 24-year-old Ontario medical student was among the 298 people killed when a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine, his family said Friday.

Andrei Anghel was studying in Romania but was travelling to Bali on that flight for a vacation, his father Sorin Anghel said.

“We got the information that the flight was shot down and we knew that he took that flight so we just assumed. Later we got the confirmation, from actually Durham police came here and they gave us the official,” Anghel said, trailing off.

Anghel was attending Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Cluj-Napoca, which is Romania’s second-largest city.

“I am passionately interested in the science of living things, always questioning. Why do cells strive for life? What defines life?” wrote Andrei Anghel on his Linkedin profile.

A photo from Andrei Anghel’s Facebook profile.

The airline has said at least one Canadian was on board the Amsterdam-to-Kuala Lumpur flight that was brought down Thursday.

U.S. intelligence officials have said a surface-to-air missile downed the plane in an area in eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists, but they did not speculate on who fired it.

Anghel says his son was a very kind, outgoing man who liked meeting other people.

He was a very outgoing, happy person. He loved life

“Everybody who knew him know that he was a very, very kind, very, very, very good person,” Anghel said with a heavy sigh. “He’s going to be missed.”

Alexandra Anghel, the older sister of Andrei, said her brother was a positive person who “wanted to change the world.”

“He was a very outgoing, happy person. He loved life. He never let anything really get him down. Even if he got upset or annoyed by something he would just go for a longboard down to the lake, come back and he’d be fine, whatever. He never really let things get him down,” she said Friday in Ajax.

“He went into medical school but I think his heart was set way more toward the research part of medicine. He really wanted to change the world. He wanted to find a cure for stuff that people are dying from. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to make it better. And he figured going into medicine was one of the best ways to do that, or at least give him the knowledge to be able to start to do something. But he was loving medical school.”

A photo from Andrei Anghel’s Facebook profile.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has issued a statement expressing shock and sadness about the tragedy and said Canada is willing to assist authorities in determining the cause of the crash.

At least 189 of the victims were from the Netherlands. Passengers on the plane also included 29 Malaysians, 28 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos and one person each from Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong, according to the airlines and those governments. Two passengers’ nationalities remained to be confirmed.

The victims include a large contingent of scientists heading to an AIDS conference in Australia.

The Ukrainian government in Kyiv, the separatist pro-Russia rebels they are fighting and the Russian government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels all denied shooting the plane down. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.